by M F Sullivan
“Have you never been to the Ergosphere?”
The woman shook her head at the General’s question while arranging all number of towels and weird froufrou oils whose mere bottles aggravated the martyr’s sinuses. “No, General. Bearers are not meant to travel to the Ergosphere unless urgent circumstances require. The Lady’s attendants there are too pure, too powerful; if we discover firsthand our true selves, all the human in us will be subsumed by them and the beauty of the Kingdom. We will forget why we ever came to Earth, and our aligned spirits must start again many years later with a new body. Just being in the Ergosphere may cause this, but the first time I enter the event horizon, I will never again leave. I will not desire to. Not all are made to come and go as you, General. But I dream of it often, and have sometimes seen it in waking, as one sees through an open window.”
“What do you do here that’s so important? Not to be rude, I just mean—I understand why you’d want to stay in the Kingdom. I guess I’d ruin things if I did it, since I’m—annoyingly—integral to this…function”—she remembered Valentinian’s formula, perhaps the clearest detail from her entire journey, and promised herself she wouldn’t forget it—“but what’s stopping you?”
“Our duty is to carry our Lady. Most cannot even touch Her. But we Bearers have adapted to suit Her, or, rather, have been adapted by our contact with our higher selves. Therefore, I have no concern for your physical state.”
Here Dominia and Basil had been accused of radioactivity: if the Lady was a black hole contained in the body of a woman, She must have been a walking atom bomb. “Why doesn’t She walk around Herself, if people can’t touch her? Genetic mutations that make you and other women radiation-resistant are fantastic, but wouldn’t it be easier if—”
“Because the day that She is forced to walk, General, the world will end. The same is said of Her voice. If She used Her mouth to speak, we would remember we have no ears.”
As the woman turned to undress Dominia, the martyr lifted a staying hand. “It’s for the best you don’t remember what happened between us. That place was like a weird dream. I’m a married woman, and here…”
Cassandra waited. The thought rose in her with a giddy flash, the bird of her heart fluttering once to prove itself not completely dead. Yes, sweet Cassandra, or what was left of her: that diamond of ashes, stolen by Miki. Soon, she would be reunited with the precious gem. And maybe—oh, fairest of words—maybe she would hold her wife in her arms that night!
She dared not dream such a thing. The thought made her more sorrowful than happy, and she stowed it away at Gethsemane’s soft smile. “Yes, General: and here, were my kisses to stray from this mouth”—the priestess brushed the martyr’s lips and provoked a shudder—“I would be a martyr within a few days without self-control. But I must treat you; what we said is true. This is a holy place, and all within are to be purified. Especially for the Lady’s wedding to Her new host.”
“Well”—wary Dominia watched the priestess unbutton her shirt, much as the nymph had unzipped her jacket only a few hours before—“I guess it’s been a while since I actually relaxed.”
Not that this bath proved actually relaxing. Stripped of her clothes and the eye patch, which, in this world, was not some key or metaphysical symbol whose removal had strange consequences not yet comprehensible, Dominia was dunked into the pool. The human soon joined her, then began to scrub her as brutally as a human grandmother scrubbing a child. There was, sadly for Dominia, nothing sexy about the experience: but, just as well. The Ergosphere may have felt a dream, but in its last moments it had become a refreshing, pleasing one. As a result, the General felt quite shagged and a bit baked, an effect impossible to receive from dream alone. To keep her mind off the feeling of her skin being buffed in water so hot it dehydrated her, Dominia asked about the temple.
“I’d think a worldly General would know more of it…but, the theaters of your Father’s wars have not yet extended to Africa, so you’ve had no cause to visit. He is wise to avoid the continent and make peace with the people upon it, trading through the waypoint of Malta as he does; he knows the land will do his people less good than someplace far to the north, and knows our own northernmost countries would be quick to punish any slight by crushing Malta before moving into Mephitoli. I think he only refrains from taking the land and improving its climate for his people because he has other priorities: if he could but have his Jerusalem along with that pesky (true) branch of the Catholic Church that fled his acquisition of the Vatican, he’d sweep from there across the Middle States. A systematic conquest of the African nations would be his next move…perhaps you will see the continent then.”
“I will never be his general again.”
“Then whose general are you, General?”
She did not know how to answer that question, and pressed on, “But this temple. I’ve heard of the pyramids, but—”
“Why would your Father let your people know of the Lady’s temple? Cairo has always been a heart of religious tradition. This place was built by the now-fading Lady when first She took the throne two thousand years ago. It was this Lady who centralized our faith and founded the Red Market as we know it; before, Her worshipers only loosely connected with one another, and the only ones who followed Her bodily avatar were those who had met the Bearers, or who were the Bearers. Even now, our services are practiced in secret, and are more often than not private visitations between the priestesses and those who pursue our brand of divine connection.”
Sacred prostitution had once sounded to her like a goofy excuse for paying to fuck, but she had to admit that after her visitation in the Kingdom, she wasn’t sure anymore. At least, the General was open-minded enough about it now to seriously compare it to her childhood faith. “Sort of like the early years of the Holy Martyr Church…it began underground, the way the Lazarenes are now. Cicero and the Lamb preached the faith and had this…cabal of groupies, I guess, musicians and artists and famous actors. Martyrs came out because one of them was prosecuted for murder and the Hierophant went public to defend him under an assumed name, though he was living in Russia at the time, spreading the faith there while pretending to be a Catholic missionary, so he wasn’t in danger like all the martyrs living in North America. He loves to tell stories from those nights, when martyrs could kill with abandon because that was what people expected of them.” She remembered her audience and tried to change to a lighter memory. “Sometimes he’d pretend to be Slavic, sometimes flat-out Russian, but then he’d imply he was Italian, or he’d talk about being raised in France…nobody could figure out where he was from or even who he was.”
“Many books have been written, General, speculating on the nature of his identity.”
“Have they?” She laughed to think there was something she didn’t know—another type of book censored from her, outside of holy books. Ill-fated scholarly works striving to debunk her Father and his Church! “How funny…I guess we all take it for granted that he’s from his alien planet, or in some way divine.” To say such a thing now seemed shockingly rotten in her mouth: Was this a growing sense of sacrilege? “I don’t know if I should talk to a human about our period of persecution, because it was natural, and we deserved it, but during that time, those groupies fled across Europa and the United Front—States, then. They carried on the Mass in secret…martyrdom used to be passed through the faith, not parenting. That changed when the HMC took possession of the Vatican, and the souls of superficial people who thought it was all variations of the same thing.”
“That is why the Lady and the Lazarenes are both so important. They save as many as they can, not just in body, but in soul.”
When the (disappointing) ritual bath was deemed finished, Dominia was hauled out of the pool, dried, and anointed with heady frankincense oil. To her surprise, however, she was redressed in a broad-shouldered man’s kimono of forest-green cotton. “Isn’t this Cairo?”
“Her Majesty-to-be is Japanese. It is the bride who desig
ns the wedding.”
She supposed that was true, but it was funny to think of Miki as a bride, let alone the stereotypical harried version arranging an over-the-top ball. Miki was a tomboy, which led Dominia down another byway of consideration. Did the Red Market women know that the geisha selected as their next Lady hadn’t always been a lady externally? Perhaps that was what had factored into their selection. But, more than likely, it didn’t matter, and nobody cared. It was far from Dominia’s place to ask, and guilt stirred in her for even wondering, though there was no rational reason for that guilt. Curiosity was natural when it came to the particulars of this occult business. If what she assumed to be an…incarnate, multidimensional pool needed a body, and wanted to make that body into a woman, and it had all the powers of a goddess, well, who was anyone to limit the original biological sex of the host?
Other pieces began to fall together, like Miki’s insistence on getting Dominia to Cairo despite the prostitute’s total lack of firsthand knowledge about the location of Lazarus. Her motivation for doing anything at all, come to think of it, was clearly rooted in this. Would her body be altered by the possession? Furthermore, what would Kahlil think? The General was sure he had never known about Miki’s past, and sure he was crushed by the idea of losing her to a religion in which he didn’t believe.
As it happened, Dominia saw him on the way back to Miki’s room, but not in the gardens. Kahlil came sulking around a corner, arms crossed over his poorly fit kimono, taqiyah slightly askew upon his head, and was utterly unprepared to run into the woman who had once allowed him to be shot by the antique gun now concealed in the convenient sleeve pocket of her kimono—safety on. Though, she could have sworn the safety was on when Basil shot him; but that was a different conversation.
Regardless, given that—and the concussion with which she’d left him after his foiled attempt to claim that gun—Kahlil resembled a cat upon the sudden appearance of a dog. “Dominia!” His voice leapt to the high tone of a man trying make terror resemble pleasant surprise. “You’re back?”
“I just got back,” she said, nodding as Gethsemane offered to take her clothes to be washed. As the priestess vanished around the same corner from which Kahlil appeared, Dominia jerked a thumb after her. “She’s a nymph in the place where I was.”
“All…right.” The man studied her face in search of some visible evidence of insanity. Instead, he noticed, “You lost your teeth.”
“They were bugged,” she said, which did not make her sound much less insane, and provoked a short laugh from the human.
“Bugged? What? By that dentist? No way.”
“Way. Turns out he runs the Hunters. Didn’t you know?” Kahlil had gotten his back up about mentioning his line of work in front of Akachi, but that could have been a charade. Nonetheless, irritation tightened the human’s face at the mere mention.
“Please. I’ve been pestered with this for weeks already. Before my concussion, I didn’t know anything worth knowing; I’m a low-level tech guy. I’ve told you this before. Tobias told me who he was while he was treating my head wound and tried to get me on his side before we went to Cairo, tried to say he’d ‘forgive’ me for helping you—but I had the feeling he was selling me a load, and when we heard about the bombing on the radio after Miki got sick of her music a few hours later, turned out we were right.”
Dominia hadn’t even thought about that, the car’s connection to the music store: that would have kept Miki from overhearing any radio broadcast hijacked by Lavinia’s virus in the early part of the marathon. What a fascinating lucky break: the boy went on. “Anyway, I don’t think anybody but the highest higher-ups really know who’s in charge of the Hunters. If they let people know who was in charge, human governments would have him. And, I mean—a dentist? If the peons knew, they wouldn’t listen to anything he had to say.”
“How do you think he got into power?” He had fed her some story about being set to be a slave to her people and joining the Hunters but had left out the part about his ascent to the throne.
Shrugging, Kahlil said, “I guess he impressed the right people at the right time. Or killed them. I don’t know—you know more about violence than I do.”
Wincing at the bitterness of his words, Dominia folded her arms in semiconscious mirroring of his body language. “How’s your head? I’m sorry about before, I…I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he said, clearly aggrieved by the memory. “They’ve got a bunch of doctors here. They checked me out while trying to interrogate me about the Hunters way more intensely than you just were.”
“Can’t say I blame them.”
“I can! They’ve been harassing me. Watching me. The only way I can feel like I’m not being watched is by going on walks, because they can’t keep track of me without obviously tailing me all over this crazy temple. I’ve been here forty days”—the number startled Dominia to hear, though she abstractly knew it—“but it took them two or three to make it clear I’m prisoner.”
“Come on, I’m sure they’ve treated you well.” She felt the weakness of her argument even before she lamely pressed on. “Clothing you, feeding you, I’m sure you have plenty of opportunities to be with beautiful women…”
“Oh, I’ve slept with, like, twelve of them since I’ve been here.” While Dominia laughed, Kahlil grinned in a way that was clearly despite himself. “I don’t care about that.” His smile faded into an expression of absent darkness. “You heard about Miki, right?”
“I was just thinking about that.”
“She’s making a huge mistake. These cultists—I guess I shouldn’t be throwing stones, since I’m part of the Hunters, and they can attract some real crazies, but I’m not one of those nuts. All I’ve ever tried to do is be a good Muslim, and a good human. That was why I joined them. Because I thought it was the human thing to do, defending ourselves against you. I sacrificed a law-abiding, secure life for what I thought was right. But Miki…she’s sacrificing her existence. She’s talking crazy. You know what she told me the other day?”
The boy’s eyes had assumed a soft tint. “‘I know you think you love me, Kahlil, but after the ceremony, there won’t be a ‘me’ to love.’” His face strained with a combination of horror and incredulity, his posture relaxed enough for him to spread his arms in demonstration of these feelings. “Would you tell me what that’s supposed to mean, Dominia? Look—can I ask you something…personal?”
With a shifty look, Kahlil folded his arms and focused his gaze somewhere around the belt of Dominia’s robe. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to talk about it, but when your…wife”—it was admittedly bold for the man to even acknowledge her wife, considering the homophobic culture of the Hunters, which only widened her mind’s openness to his concern—“died, did you…I guess—do you think you’ll ever get over it? Losing her? Allah, I’m so stupid to ask… You won’t. You’re on a journey to resurrect her, right?” They both laughed together, hollowly; the boy removed his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose, to hide the red of his closing eyes. “But how do you go on? How do you even wake up in the morning?”
“I don’t,” she teased. “I wake up in the evening.”
In one tearful note that jerked his shoulders, Kahlil laughed behind his hand, and sympathetic Dominia considered touching him before she thought better of it. “I wake up because I have to,” she said. “Because it’s what Cassandra would want for me.”
“I don’t think Miki ever wanted anything for me… Hell, she never wanted me.”
A horrible feeling, that. “You can’t let yourself think something like that. She’s a prostitute, but she’s also a person, and it seems like she spent a lot of time with you. She talks fondly about you to me, anyway. You don’t know what she’s thought, what she’s wanted, while visiting you. I’ll bet she was just as happy to be with you as you were with her. But it’s not about you, what she’s doing. It’s about herself—what she believes, what she wants.” The General faltere
d, and realized she spoke to herself. Kahlil’s eyes had opened, and he watched her now from behind replaced glasses. Quietly, she told him, “You can’t let her decision to do this to herself ruin your whole life.”
“Probably too late.” The young man chuckled. Down the broad hall, the Lady-to-be rounded a corner with a trio of Bearers. On seeing Dominia, she gave a cry of delight. With a snort toward the sound, Kahlil turned back to the General and lowered his voice.
“I feel culpable in this, you know. She’s been brainwashed. She’s going to let these psycho women keep her captive and brainwash her more and more—take her whole life away, even cause her death. Are you going to let that happen? Am I?”
“Ultimately”—the martyr adjusted her tone and expression to reflect excitement on Miki’s high-speed approach—“it’s her religion, her body, her decision… Hey, Miki!”
“Hey, girl, hey,” squealed the future Lady, blasting past Kahlil to throw her arms around the General’s neck. “Damn, you look fine in that kimono! What’s up, Kahlil?” She turned, still clinging to Dominia, to nod at the man.
“Just welcoming Dominia. I’ll let you two catch up. Be careful on your stay, General…who knows what these people will convince you to do.” With a disdainful glance for the Bearers, three older women who openly watched the Hunter’s tech guy as if at any second he might assault Miki, Kahlil ducked away from them and went down the hall from which Dominia had come.
“He’s just bitter”—Miki whispered to Dominia—“because he feels like I spurned him… He doesn’t understand. The problem with long-term clients. They always want to save you.”
Yeah: that was all Kahlil wanted. Just to save Miki, and to have that salvation rewarded by her love. Those shards of herself that the General found in him and his hopeless love inspired natural pity. What was infinitely more desirable about a woman whose love was somehow tainted? Why was that woman always worth so much more than all the honest women in the world, those gained at lesser cost? The General would never understand it, not in all the time she lived.